WASHINGTON — In their final years before moving to Minnesota, the Washington Senators struggled to keep fans interested. They were never contenders. Their statistics, generally, were so meager that their broadcaster rarely cited them.

“I wasn’t too big on telling people, “This guy’s now hitting .202,”‘ said the broadcaster, Bob Wolff, now 92 years old. “I’d look for human-interest stories all the time to keep people listening to the game. I’d just say, “Well, folks, it’s 17-3,’ and they knew which team was losing.”

Wolff’s curiosity sustained him for 15 years in this city, and many more elsewhere in a professional journey that wound through Madison Square Garden and continues today for News 12 Long Island. His 74-year career is the longest in sports broadcasting history, as certified by Guinness World Records.

And, incredibly, Wolff recorded and retained almost all of it.

“He was an archivist at heart, in the best sense of the word,” said Gene DeAnna, the head of the recorded sound section of the Library of Congress. “He was not a hoarder, that’s not what I mean. He was systematic, organized, and had this sense of the future and the sense of the importance of his legacy to keep it and to take care of it, and we are very grateful that he did.”

Wolff, who called the Twins’ first two seasons in Minnesota (1961-62), has donated about 1,400 audio and video recordings, consisting of well more than 1,000 hours, to the Library of Congress, which will honor him in a ceremony next week.

Much of the material, DeAnna said, comes from an era when broadcasts were erased or not recorded at all. Wolff called some of the most memorable sports moments of the last century, including Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series and the Colts-Giants NFL championship game in 1958. But the jewels of the collection are his interviews.

The subjects in Wolff’s trove range from Babe Ruth and Connie Mack to Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez, plus Vince Lombardi, Joe Louis, Jim Thorpe and nearly every other major sports celebrity to cross his path. He was a pioneer in the creation of pre- and postgame shows, which he syndicated to various teams for their local broadcasts.

“In the early days, the people doing interviews, for the most part, were former athletes,” Wolff said. “They were people who had spent their time answering questions because they were stars, and had never asked a question in their lives.”

Wolff wanted to be a baseball star, but broke his ankle in a rundown play as a freshman at Duke. He turned to broadcasting for WDNC in Durham, N.C., in 1939, and soon found a winning formula for his interviews: start with an offbeat, relaxing question; move to something newsworthy; finish with a question that focuses on a source of pride for the subject.

Wolff said he always wanted the interview to be appealing to the audience and enjoyable for the athlete, but he was no pushover. He once approached Ted Williams for an interview, and Williams, noticing the microphone, scowled at Wolff and muttered to himself. Wolff later chastised Williams, who made him a deal: The next time they met, if Williams had a certain batting average, he would do the show.

Williams, indeed, had met his high standards when he next encountered Wolff. But he had also just sworn off all interviews in another of his famous feuds with the Boston news media.

“Ted, you told me this with a handshake, but I read about what happened in Boston, and if you live up to your deal with me, as a reporter, I’ve got to ask you if you have any remorse,” Wolff said he told Williams. “But you’re a friend of mine, and if you want to bow out, we’re still friends. But if you want to go on, I’ve got to ask you the questions.”

Wolff said Williams did not hesitate.

“What time’s the interview?” Williams said. “Ask anything you want.”

Wolff, still sharp over the phone from his home in South Nyack, N.Y., is known as a gentleman of the press corps; the stories behind his stories remain vivid. The interviews are compelling historical documents, and Wolff preserved many of the early ones on 16-inch lacquer discs — slices of sports’ oral history on pizza-size records.

“For sound quality loss, these are the most at risk because once that little, thin layer of lacquer peels off, it’s gone,” DeAnna said. “To get these from Bob, in the condition they’re in, for an archivist, you can’t ask for more. We’re getting to these before time gets to them.”

The Library of Congress is digitizing Wolff’s collection and making much of it available to the public online. The library shared several recordings with The New York Times last week, including interviews with Ty Cobb, Jackie Robinson and Tris Speaker.

Robinson gives fielding tips — keep the glove low, brushing against the dirt — and, in a group interview after his groundbreaking rookie season, offers a rather benign comparison when asked about the abuse he took from Southern players.

“I went to UCLA,” Robinson says. “USC is our archrival across town. Suppose I suddenly had to go over and root for USC during a crucial game between USC and UCLA. I mean, I think that’s the same way that these fellows felt when they came up out of the South. They have certain things instilled with them in the South, and they had to come up, all of a sudden, and were pushed in with me. At first they didn’t know just how to take it, but as the season progressed, there was certainly no feeling at all between us and we got along swell.”

Wolff would later call Robinson’s final hit in the major leagues, a 10th-inning single to win Game 6 of the 1956 World Series. He was too young to broadcast Speaker’s games, but interviewed him when he came through Washington while working for the Cleveland Indians in 1948.

Speaker, the Hall of Famer and baseball’s career leader in doubles, predicts stardom for Larry Doby and states that another young Cleveland outfielder, Dale Mitchell, might one day hit .400. He was right about Doby and wrong, of course, about Mitchell.

Wolff asks Speaker, who died in 1958, how he was able to play such a shallow center field. Speaker mentions a celebrated pitcher who last played in 1911.

“Bob, I used to play center field closer than any other center fielder, but I learned to do that because I chased fungoes practically all my life,” Speaker says. “I had Cy Young hitting fungoes to me in Boston for a number of years, and of course, after Cy left the Boston club, I continued to chase those fungoes. Watch the fungo hitter toss the ball and tell which direction he was going to hit.

“And Cy tried to hit the ball that one step that I couldn’t go, and I used to sneak a little bit on him and I’d start before he hit. And many times I’d catch up to that ball and Cy had a tough time fooling me after a few years of it.”

The prize of the collection might be Wolff’s interview with Cobb, conducted, he says on the recording, in Cobb’s room at the Statler Hotel — now the Capital Hilton — in Washington. Cobb shares with Wolff his career highlight: a 17-inning tie with the Philadelphia Athletics on Sept. 30, 1907, in which Cobb ripped a two-out, two-run homer in the ninth.

Even without winning it, Cobb says, the game catapulted his Detroit Tigers to the American League pennant.

“Our pitcher, Bill Donovan, pitched the full 17 innings,” Cobb says. “And of course the Athletics used about five of their pitchers, relieving and so forth. Well, it took the edge off the Athletic pitching staff, and we had only used up one pitcher, so our remaining pitchers were fresh. We breezed through and won the rest of the games.”

Wolff flatters Cobb, calling him the game’s greatest player, but also asserts that Cobb was “a pretty mean man on the bases,” a characterization Cobb disputes. As much as he hears about his aggressive style, Cobb grumbles, plenty of fielders spiked his ankles and knees by jumping for throws and landing on him.

“Well, Ty,” Wolff says, “I think you perhaps have mellowed a bit with the years because the stories of your thunder on the bases are certainly ones in baseball’s renowned file of classics.”

Wolff goes on to ask Cobb about his technique on the bases, how he read pitchers and got jumps. Cobb plays along for a while, but he is still agitated.

“Getting back to this spiking business,” he says, “you know, the baseline belongs to the runner!”

Wolff hangs in, like a fearless second baseman with Cobb barreling down.

“And you played up to the rules all the time, I’m sure of that,” Wolff says.

At this point, Cobb lets up.

“Well,” he concedes, after a pause, “a lot of the times.”

Wolff has stood his ground, applying the metaphorical tag to the great Cobb, and the conversation continues. The audience is surely entertained, and after a while, Cobb even seems to enjoy himself. The interview is saved, for decades and decades, and now, for posterity.

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